Tuesday, January 2, 2007

how to do the infant visual stimulation in creative ways

Babies learn about the environment surrounding them through five senses:
vision, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. Of those five senses, vision is the least developed sense a baby has at birth.

Therefore, it is important for parents to help their babies to ‘perfect’ their vision during the first few months of their baby’s life.

When a baby receives visual stimulation, the vision-related nerve cells , which initially are not well connected, start to form a lot of connection with other nerve cells. This will finally make the baby’s eyes to thrive, enabling the baby to see better.


Newborn baby.

First, let’s see what the research says. Research has found that newborn’s eyes register contrasting color such as white, black and red the best. So the best way to stimulate your baby’s eyes is by exposing your baby to as much dark and light as possible.

Try these following activities:-
- Show your baby light and dark contrasting toys including the ones attached to the baby mobiles, wrist rattles and other educational baby toys.
- Show books with pictures which have contrasting colors.
- And if you don't mind to go a bit overboard, surround your baby with objects which have contrasting colors. These may include: bedding, play area and even yourself. Yes, you can actually wear shirts with stripes when tending your baby.

Research has also shown that newborn can only focus their eyes on objects between 8-12 inches away from them. Therefore, try to stay within that boundary when you interact with your baby.

Around 2 months,

your baby will be able to move from highly contrasting colors to bright bold colors. Your baby will also enjoy faces and is ready to see a moving object in addition to the stationary one.

Here are some activities to try:

- Activity with the play gym or baby mobiles: place your baby on her back and put the play gym or baby mobile on her. Move the toys like a pendulum.
- Activity with rattle or other objects: move the baby rattle from left to right, or up and down.
- Mirror: show your baby her face. Enhance this activity by pointing her facial features and talk about them.

Around 5 months

When your baby’s around 5 months, train your baby’s eyes to focus even more.

These following exercises will assist your baby to develop concentration and enhance the curiousity .
- Play the peekaboo with your baby.
- Play with a yo yo and encourage your baby to see the yo yo movement.
- Dribble or throw a ball. Encourage your baby to follow the ball's movement.
- Follow-a-spool activity: roll a spool of thread towards your baby and then move it to the opposite direction (i.e. farther from her). Let your baby's eyes follow the movement.
- Put a little ball or marble inside a big bowl. Tilt the bowl and move it around, so that the ball moves around the bowl. Show this to your baby and let your baby's eyes follow the movement.
- Play a simple hide and seek game with your baby.

If your baby has been properly visually stimulated, by 8 months, your baby should have completed her visual development and has a good vision.

About the Author
Dian Dewi is a mom and webmaster of
Best Child Toys, a website which provides guidance on how to choose toys which are fun

For more articles visit my site http://woman.davbindu.com/
This information is collected from number of sites and modified and reused, I will remain grateful to the respective original authors. Thus it is no way copyrighted and if you want, you can reuse these articles in your newsletter, web site or ebook. You don't need to take my permission for re-publishing these articles, as long as you display the resource box at the end of each article

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